She's Up to No Good(88)

“Do you need any of your pills?”

“No. I’m just going to lie down for a little while.”

“Are—are you okay? I’m going to call Mom.”

This elicited the ghost of a reaction. “What’s your mother going to do? Let me lie down. I’ll be . . . fine.”

“You promise? You seem—”

“Jenna.”

I brushed her hair back and kissed her forehead. “I’m not going anywhere. If you need anything, just call for me.”

She was already asleep, snoring softly, as I tiptoed out of the room.





I cleaned the kitchen and used Uber Eats to order from a restaurant in town for when she woke up. Then I sat at the kitchen table, looking through the photo album she had left there. My grandfather was in the album, young and handsome, carrying my grandmother through the surf while she laughed. A picture from her wedding, Vivie standing next to her as her maid of honor. And then the album ended, blank pages left in it. I rested my head in my hands when I reached the end, saying a silent prayer that my grandmother was okay.

She reemerged around five, looking older and tired. I jumped up to guide her to a chair, then went to get her more water. “I ordered food. Are you hungry?”

“No.” She took a sip of the water, then held the glass out to me. “I’m going to need something stronger than this.”

“Absolutely not.”

She cocked her head. “And why not?”

“Because you had a . . . spell today. And Mom said you’re not supposed to drink with your medication and—”

“Oh, darling. That wasn’t a physical thing.”

“It—what?”

“Pour us a drink and sit. It’s time you knew about Vivie.”

The hairs on the back of my neck rose as I gripped the kitchen counter. Then I poured orange juice into two glasses, added vodka from the cabinet, and joined her at the table, my eyes wide as she took a sip and then began to speak.





CHAPTER FORTY-NINE


June 1955


Hereford, Massachusetts


Fred couldn’t get away from his new job, so Evelyn took the car, picked Vivie up at the station, and drove the four hours from their rented house in New Rochelle to Hereford. He could take the train into the city for work, and Evelyn missed the salt smell of the air, the feel of the sand between her toes, her parents, and most of all, her youngest sister.

Vivie attended Barnard, and they should have seen each other more frequently once Fred and Evelyn moved to New Rochelle—that was one of the selling points for Evelyn to leave Boston. But it was over an hour of travel in each direction between the train and then the subway or cab from the 125th Street station. And Vivie was always so busy, not just with school, but with friends and the boyfriend who consumed more and more of her time.

George Eller was three years older than Vivie, and they met when she was a freshman and he a senior at Columbia. Vivie knew immediately he was the one for her and began a campaign that bordered on obsession to make him realize the same. For two years, they were friends. He called her “kid.”

And then, one night, everything changed.

Vivie lobbied hard to stay in the city for the summer, citing Evelyn’s proximity as a reason she could be trusted, offering even to live with Evelyn and Fred (without her sister’s permission, though it would have been granted), but to no avail. Both Miriam and Joseph stood firm; the children all came home for the summer while in college, and Vivie would be no exception.

Evelyn was at the cottage for a week, staying up late into the night talking with her sister, the topic of George dominating the conversation. Evelyn had met him twice, both times in the city. She and Fred tried to get Vivie to bring him to dinner at the house, but it never happened. Evelyn found him handsome, arrogant, and dull in his sense of self-importance. But with his inflated ego, he treated Vivie as, if not his equal, then very close to it. And Vivie, never quite as radiant in her own sphere as Evelyn, shone fiercely in his presence. Which was all that mattered to Evelyn.

She returned to New York at the end of the week, promising to come back at the end of the month when Fred would take his vacation time. Evelyn would stay another week or two when he left, soaking in as much of Hereford as she could. If she stayed mostly at the cottage, she ran almost no risk of running into Tony—not that she had anything to say to him if she did. The book with his ring had stayed in her childhood bedroom when she married, and she sometimes went weeks without thinking of him in her new life.

But when Evelyn and Fred joined the family at the cottage, they found a house in turmoil.

“No,” Miriam was saying. No one even noticed Evelyn and Fred standing in the front hall. And while Evelyn typically announced her entrance in great style with the loud flourishes reserved for royalty, the raised voices that they heard through the living room windows precluded that.

“But, Mama—”

“No. If it’s what you think, he’ll come to the house.”

Vivie stomped her foot like a child, one hand on her hip, the other gripping the yellow paper of a Western Union telegram. “He’s not like you with your old-country ways. Don’t you see how backward you’re being?”

Joseph shook his head from his armchair, a newspaper discarded next to him. “It’s not backward. It’s respect.”